Somehow, I don’t think it’s a competition.

They’re all in the 2+/-.2 C range, and increasing in frequency.

What’s different about the flyover states is they are flat, are running out of water, and all the increased tornadic/hail activity is just going to make them no-mans-land over the next half century, outside of the temperature issues. (And not trying to compete either, it’s just weird.)

The amount of larger hail popping out of these storms is crazy too. Homes will need stronger roofs and windows, there will be more risk to aircraft as well with how rapid they seem to be popping off these days. (Secondary issues will be developing as well since the US is slashing weather prediction budget, which is reducing available data.)

Links on what damage to expect, a plane a few years ago that ended up damaged from a hail storm over New Mexico, double-sucks too, the airplane’s weather radar is in the nosecone, so they lose their ability to see what they’re flying through in that case:

Link 1

Link 2

But what parties they get to have on their super mega yachts while abusing the people that work for them or are abducted by them! /s

That is also the first thing that popped in my head.

Oh, the stories I could tell you… I should write a book some day.

My general contribution to the conversation is GitHub should have a donation system. Once a week, some kind of donation raffle happens, and the winner gets GitHub taken down for “reasons” for 4 hours, then 5, 6, 8. Microsoft profits more, and it slowly becomes a technology-and-money-induced vacation day.

Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.

Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.

Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.

When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?

When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.

Win+R, notepad, enter. The run command still works…for now.

They sure are destroying that platform at lightning speed.

Hah, per window.

Especially when those closed-minded anus-licking morons don’t realize that pretty much any change is opportunity for profit, they just have to follow the market shift and become leaders in the appropriate industries of the future.

Not trying to sound “yay capitalism 4eva” but seriously, the whole beauty of (properly regulated) capitalism is, “holy shit a new thing, lets go make billions!” Instead, they bury their heads, and everyone else’s, in the sand, and miss out on opportunity while they kill everyone.

But hey, change is scary to their tiny brains and they can’t comprehend, so oh well…

Cooling water is generally cycled.

On the front end, you can put lipstick on that pig.

On the back end, it has to work and there’s nowhere to apply lipstick.

OTOH, it seems there is a trend in modern dev practices that it’s acceptable for a service to terminate frequently, as long as it respawns, which finally made me figure out all the sci-fi tropes where a ship’s systems aren’t responding. It’s because too many are crashing in concert. But mostly terrifying that this practice would ever be considered practical.

All I ever see is most people using (whatever system cloud provider comes with their computer/phone/tablet) and forking over $3, 5, $10, $20 a month to make the “your cloud is full!” alert to go away.

Somewhere in the middle is the way, and in countries like the US, that something in the middle should probably not be a US cloud provider anymore.

Meanwhile, whales are smart enough to take out yachts. We are this planet’s true plague.

I consider LLMs basically high-frequency StackExchange trading. You gotta be exact and not keep the thread alive too long or driftrot is real though. Much faster to parse, though.

Also, the ones that can access the web are great for “I want specific lib x version y to solve a weird problem, what support libs are needed?”

The concept of an influencer should, ideally, be made illegal. I’m convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They’d much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer’s opinion. That way, people can subscribe to people that have similar opinions as themselves, and not be spooked by information that is “scary” or challenges their worldview.

It is like influencer was the next progression after social media echo chambers came into existence. A role inserted between old/traditional methods of information delivery, that parses it and delivers it in a format appealing to a particular audience. A role that has never had any certification or vetting process. Just some dude with a microphone in his mom’s bathroom.

So many people (in America at least) legitimately want to get into this as a “career” too, which is disturbing. Rather than doing real work of any kind to benefit society. If everyone is an influencer, who’s maintaining the codebase that makes their streams possible? Designing the hardware the software runs on? The power plants that run the datacenters? etc.

That being said, traditional media definitely hasn’t adapted well to the changing methods of information delivery, so maybe this is our 21st century media transition happening organically, and standards will eventually follow, hopefully.

I just realized how odd it would be to see people walking around in brandless clothes. As odd as when someone removes all the badges from their car.

The advertising has been so prevalent for so long that it has been normalized. Fascinating.

They’re about 2% better at being a telephone IVR than the older ones, probably at 6x the power cost.

I had an AI render a simple diagram for a presentation with explicit instructions. It rendered a Rube Goldberg nonsense graphic. I included it anyway for the lulz. Sure, they will get better, and maybe some day be almost as useful as the Enterprise computer. No way they’ll be Lt. Cmdr. Data this century.

What an aimless waste of compute, all because these moronic tech companies believe people have a want or need to book a hotel by talking to a graphics card.

I remember seeing “green” crap back in the 90s and early aughts that were always going, “See, we take this plastic bottle, and grind it up into bits, then we combine it with some other stuff, mix in some asphalt, and presto, new road surface! New playground turf! Transform plasic into new plastic for all this other stuff!” It was so amazing we could take plastic and recycle it!

Then to find out years later that none of this ever happens. My state was sending bales of plastic to China to be recycled burned in incinerators until it became too expensive in 2018 or so.

It’s fun having been lied to for decades, only to find out it was all bullshit the whole time and we weren’t even trying to slow the use of plastic.